What command does the installer use to install the boot loader?
I sucessfully installed CentOS 8 to the server, with /usr on a mirrored SSD pair on the RAID controller and /boot on the internal SD card (where Dell wants one to boot from). Before rebooting, I inspected the installation at /mnt/sysimage and the disk usage looked reasonable. I saw a grub directory in /boot but no second stage boot loader nor any config files for it.
At the end of the process, I got an error message that the installer failed to install the boot loader and the resulting system wouldn't boot. It didn't. There were no details useful for diagnosis. So now I'm about to boot the installer DVD into rescue mode to manually install the boot loader and see the real error message. So what command do I issue?
On Mon, Oct 21, 2019 at 02:35:26AM -0700, Kenneth Porter wrote:
What command does the installer use to install the boot loader?
What kind of boot are you doing? Legacy/BIOS or UEFI?
On Mon, Oct 21, 2019 at 09:07:39AM -0400, Jonathan Billings wrote:
On Mon, Oct 21, 2019 at 02:35:26AM -0700, Kenneth Porter wrote:
What command does the installer use to install the boot loader?
What kind of boot are you doing? Legacy/BIOS or UEFI?
One way to check is to look for the existence of /sys/firmware/efi/, if it's there, you've booted via UEFI.
It was set to BIOS when I got the error that installing the bootloader failed. I'm now trying it in UEFI mode.
Success!
Using the gparted live DVD, I switched the BIOS to use UEFI and repartitioned the internal 1GB SD card to GPT, 256 MB FAT32 EFI boot partition, 666 MB ext4 partition for /boot, and I was off to the races. I was able to do a minimal install and have it boot to a login prompt. Now to install package groups...
BTW, all this was done using the virtual DVD drive provided by the Dell remote console hardware, mounting ISO files from my Win10 box. That works pretty nicely. No need to muck about with actual disks or USB sticks.
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Jonathan Billings -
Kenneth Porter